Monthly Archives: August 2024

47 years ago today, Groucho Marx passed away — an event that did not come as a surprise to anyone who'd seen him in the last few years of his long, monumental life. I had visited his home in the Trousdale area not long before for a surreal — and in many ways, sad — afternoon. Groucho's secretary/assistant Steve Stoliar was almost certainly there that day but somehow, I did not meet Steve, who has since become a good friend.

That home had an "open house" feel to it that day with people — some very famous — dropping by, some staying only long enough so that they could say, "I was there." Some left hurriedly when his companion/guardian/I-don't-know-what-to-call-her Erin Fleming put the moves on them to hire her for acting work because Groucho, she said, would appreciate it.

There really wasn't much to do there that day for them except to avoid her, talk to each other and partake of the snacks and beverages. A conversation with Mr. Marx was almost impossible…as I found when someone (I dunno who) led me over to him, introduced me as a young comedy writer and plunked me down to baby-sit a Comedy Legend.

Sadly, there wasn't much of him left by that point. I said things to him about how much I loved him and his movies and the quiz shows. He said things to me in a voice that was weak and hard to hear. I laughed and nodded, pretending I understood every word he said but I didn't. Fortunately, that was not the only time I met the man.

One earlier afternoon at Hillcrest Country Club, we had an actual conversation when he was able to have an actual conversation and I said all the respectful, affectionate things I wanted to say to him then. I got the feeling that he really liked that a kid my age — then, mid-teens — knew all his work and loved it and was also aware of the brilliance of George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott and others of his world.

If I'd had more time with that Groucho, I would have elaborated on why he and his work meant so much to me — the wit, the fearlessness, the sheer funny in just about everything he said, everything he did. I also talked with him a tiny bit when he visited the set of Welcome Back, Kotter when I was working on that show.

That evening, he was so "out of it" that he could not tape the wordless cameo appearance he'd come to do. It did not occur to me that evening that he really wasn't up to even coming there but that the controversial Ms. Fleming had pumped him full of some sort of drug just to get him there…for her purposes more than his. In hindsight, I kinda wish my contact with the man had ended in that big dining room at Hillcrest.

So it was not a shocker when he died; only that a gent known for his masterful timing had mistimed his exit. It came too soon after the death of Elvis Presley for Groucho to get his proper press coverage and national mourning. Happily though, it was not the end of the man born Julius Henry Marx. His influence is still everywhere — in movies, on TV, in cartoons and especially in the way some of us talk. He left a few generations of admirers who can't help but incorporate bad Groucho impressions (or at least, attempts at his rhythms) in their everyday speech.

You probably do that. I know I do. I've done it many times with people who for one reason or another, were never exposed to the genuine article. My lady friend Amber has heard plenty of inept Groucho mimicry, much of it from me, but she's never seen a Marx Brothers movie, nor have I taken her to experience the expert Groucho replication of my pal, Frank Ferrante. One reason is that I want her to see the real Groucho before she sees the faux guy.

And I want her to see the real thing in one of his best movies not via a DVD in my den but in a real movie theater with a real audience watching and laughing at…oh, any of them. It could be Monkey Business or maybe Horse Feathers or Duck Soup or A Night at the Opera or A Day at the Races. Hell, she'd even love him in The Big Store if she had nothing to compare it to. Only then will I take her to see Frank and only then might she grasp how important this Groucho Marx guy was to nurturing what passes for my sense of humor. In some ways, a lot of us are Groucho impersonators. Frank just does it better than anybody and gets paid for doing it.

We haven't spoken in a long, long time and even then, we didn't agree on much. Still, I was saddened to hear that my ol' friend Victoria Jackson is suffering from medical problems that could end her life sooner rather than later. I hope, of course, this turns out to be wrong. She was sweet, she was funny, she was honest…in fact, she had the kind of honesty that sometimes got her into trouble. There's such a thing as being too honest — or at least just honest at the wrong time or place.

I'd like to think she's still sweet and funny and honest and that we could get along again. If we stayed far, far away from the topics of politics and religion, that might be possible but I doubt our paths will cross again. So I'll just think good thoughts about her and wish her only the best and a lot more years than she thinks she has.

A few weeks ago at Comic-Con in San Diego, two Bill Finger Awards for Excellence in Comic Book Writing were awarded — one to Jo Duffy, who was there to accept it in person. The other was awarded — posthumously — to Ralph Newman, who wrote a staggering number of stories for Harvey Comics characters including but not limited to Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Good Little Witch, Sad Sack, Little Audrey, Little Lotta, Richie Rich, Spooky, Little Dot, Hot Stuff and The Ghostly Trio.

If you'd like to know more about Mr. Newman, check out this article.

Here are five more of these, starting with Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales, which joined the CBS schedule in 1963…one of those occasional attempts to make children's television a bit more "educational." Don Adams at the time had a recurring role on The Bill Dana Show on NBC and hadn't yet signed on for Get Smart, and Larry Storch hadn't yet been cast in F Troop. Thus, they were available to be in the voice cast of this show…

Speed Racer was another dubbed Japanese show that came over here in 1967 and was quickly embraced by many eager fans. I was not one of them but I liked the opening…

In 1962, Hanna-Barbera produced a block of cartoons called unofficially, The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series or sometimes, The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Series. Neither title ever appeared on the air. What it was was a package of three different cartoons, each with its own main title. Wally Gator was one, Touché Turtle and Dum Dum was another and Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har was the third. They made 52 shorts of each and the local stations that bought 'em programmed them every which way, usually with a local host between the different segments.

My favorite was Wally Gator and though I liked his little main title and tune, it puzzled me. As you'll see, it showed him zipping around a swamp as the singers referred to him as a "swingin' alligator in the swamp." Okay, fine…but in the cartoons that followed this, he was always in a zoo and not a swamp. That baffled ten-year-old me but Wally's voice was done by Daws Butler and I could never dislike a cartoon character voiced by Daws Butler…

Jonny Quest (1964) was one of the first real attempts to do an adventure show in animation for television. (Clutch Cargo and Space Angel both preceded it but I'm not sure if you'd call what they did on those shows "animation.") Jonny Quest was a Hanna-Barbera show created by Doug Wildey, a brilliant and incorrigible artist who I am proud to say I knew well…maybe too well. I'm still a little pissed, as Doug was, that his credit line was removed from the end titles of some prints of some episodes.

One thing I liked about this show was that the lady who headed up Standards and Practices for ABC in the eighties — a lady with whom I often mud-wrestled — despised it. It was to her, the show which ruined television animation by introducing "violence" into the arena. That was a silly charge, especially if you saw what passed in her eyes for "violence." On Jonny Quest, it never got much worse than what was in this main title which, incidentally, was mostly not animated for Jonny Quest. All the shots without Jonny or other recurring characters were from a demo that H-B made for an unsold pilot film for a show based on the old radio series, Jack Armstrong…

And lastly for this time around: The DePatie-Freleng cartoon studio did more than all those Pink Panther cartoons. In 1966. they gave us Super 6 with a theme song sung by Gary Lewis of Gary Lewis and the Playboys…or maybe Gary Lewis without his short-lived rock band. Can't say I was ever fond of the show but as you've seen from these lists, I could like the theme song without liking what followed…

I'm going to post five more of these in a day or two and then I'll probably move on to some other topic of vital importance.

My confidence that Harris/Walz will prevail in the election stands at about 85% and it's not based wholly on the polls. They're still a bit too close, bouncing around their margins of error as they do. My optimism has a lot to do with the way once-President/never-again Trump is acting, coming across more and more like an uncle at a Bar Mitzvah who's had way too much Manischewitz and has no idea what he's supposed to be saying.

You see him belittling military veterans and you have to wonder why. There are no votes in doing that but many to be lost.

Based on clips from the last few days, the outstanding issues in this election for his team seem to be that he's so much better looking than Kamala, his crowd turn-outs are bigger no matter what the news footage might indicate and that once in her life, at a moment of great stress, she consumed an entire bag of Doritos. That's just about all they've got. They'll come up with something else but right now, that's about all they've got.

Here's Kate Zernike with a look at the role that Abortion Politics could be playing in this country. I think it'll turn out a lot more voters who want Harris in office than want Trump there.

And right after I posted the previous video, I spotted this online — a quick tour of The Magic Castle, the clubhouse for a group of which I am a member of 40+ years. The piece has some errors. Penn & Teller and Johnny Carson owe nothing to The Castle for their careers — Johnny was the host of The Tonight Show long before he ever set foot in the place — but a great many other magicians do.

The attractive blond lady who says "It's a bucket list destination" is my friend Sara Ballantine, daughter of The Amazing (Carl) Ballantine. And Nick Dopuch is a much better magician than is represented here. But it's a great place and because of my temporary mobility problem, I miss not visiting it…

A question I get from time to time here is "Who's the best sleight-of-hand magician alive today?" That's a hard one to answer because there are at least a dozen guys who are so good that it's impossible to say that one's better than the others but a strong contender would be Steve Forte. Here's a few minutes that'll remind you never to play cards with strangers…

So the polls say that right now, Kamala Harris is about where Donald Trump was when Joe Biden elected to not stand for re-election and Donald Trump is about where Biden was then. And it feels like everyone who wants Trump to win is urging him to drop the personal attacks and obsession with crowd size and focus on the issues…to which Trump responds by increasing the personal attacks and the obsession on crowd size.

Many, many years ago I heard a speech by Dan Rather about all those years when he covered presidential elections. He went back to Nixon in 1960 and he said that you should never believe any politician of any party when they boast about how many people they had at their campaign stops. He had all these stories about candidates claiming they had 5,000 people in a building that could hold, at most, two thousand.

And he said that often, this was the function of "Advance Men" — guys who volunteered to do the dirty work in the campaign in the hopes of landing great jobs in the administration if their guy won. 1,800 people showed up but the Advance Guy, trying to impress the candidate, told him 4,000 and then the candidate figured he could bump it up to five. The press, of course, is then lying and biased for saying it was 1,800. Trump probably needs no middle man.

I meant to write an update when it had been 200 days since I mysteriously broke my left ankle but I missed that milestone. It's been 208 and I'm quite a bit better than when last I wrote about this. In fact, I was better enough to go to Comic-Con in San Diego and by limiting my activities and having folks wheelchair me from place to place and panel to panel, I got through four days and five nights with a minimum of discomfort. After many months of feeling (mostly) locked away in my home, there was something very therapeutic about getting out and getting so many things done.

There's still that balance problem when I walk but at least I can walk. One of my physical therapists at the Nursing Facility where I lived for 33 days said, "Don't get frustrated that it's not normal yet. Just be proud and pleased each time it feels a little closer to normal." I'm settling for that.

The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine who's now in a Nursing Facility due to a fractured hip. He's more or less where I was in February and I was telling him that my still-limited mobility has forced me to be more selective about activities. I decided to attend Comic-Con but there are a lot of activities I've decided not to attempt. It's not a bad thing to reassess your priorities and to say of some possible outing, "You know, I really don't need to do that." I now value my time and effort a bit more highly.

In this recent post, I wrote that Jay Ward's cartoon studio "…whipped up an unsold pilot for Super Chicken with Don Knotts in the title role and Louis Nye voicing his sidekick, Fred." This brought several queries wanting to know more about this cartoon and where it could be seen. Had any of those who wrote taken advantage of the search engine on this site, they could have found this from back when we were mourning the passing of Mr. Nye…

A voice track was recorded to try and sell Ward's idea but it was never animated. Actor Marvin Miller served as narrator, Knotts played Super Chicken and Nye voiced his faithful sidekick, Fred. Bill Scott and Mel Blanc (!) voiced some supporting characters. Ward and his business partners played the recording for potential sponsors and showed them storyboards and artwork but no one went for it. In 1965, Jay produced another Super Chicken pilot but this time, he cast Scott as Super Chicken and Paul Frees as Fred, and they ultimately did the roles when the series was picked up as an element of the 1967 Saturday morning series, George of the Jungle.

For what it's worth, I thought Super Chicken was the best thing on the George of the Jungle show, better even than George, and the best thing the Ward studio produced after the original Rocky & Bullwinkle series. It's a shame the property never had a show of its own.

Let's look back on Season 9 of Saturday Night Live on this installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live. This was a year I don't remember all that well…which I don't think I regarded as "Must See TV." By this point, I had long since stopped trying to be home Saturday evenings at 11:30 PM to catch its broadcast in real time. I had a VCR snag it so I could watch it the next day (or later) with the Fast Forward control at the ready. Maybe one of these days I'll subscribe to Peacock — or some other source by which I can watch those episodes again — and see what I missed…

Trump slips a little more in the polling…says some unhinged and desperate-sounding things online or in some speeches…articles say everyone is urging him to change his act, which sounds to me like someone telling Foster Brooks to knock off the drunk bit…

And so it goes. I saw a clip of him ranting — as if this is an issue of any importance whatsoever — that Kamala Harris was made to look unrealistically attractive on the current Time cover. As Kevin Drum points out, that's ridiculous. Donald's just mad he's not on that cover. (Remember when it came out that Trump had a fake cover of Time on his wall that made him look the way he wanted every magazine to make him look?)

In fact, that's pretty much what all Trump's rage tweets and speeches are about these days: I'm not getting all the attention! The Democratic National Convention oughta send him even farther over that ledge. And here, Amanda Marcotte makes a good point…

But Republicans may be overly optimistic that a pivot-to-policy approach would do much better for Trump. If there's anything the majority of Americans hate more than Trump's vile personality, it's his policy agenda.

I don't expect this freefall to last. At some point, Trump's gotta rebound a little and we'll get all those clickbait stories about him maybe making a comeback. But right now, I don't think Kamala's winning so much as Donald is losing…and not just the election. What he's losing is "it."

My list of My Ten Favorite Cartoon Show Openings From My Youth brought a few irate "How could you leave off my favorite?" messages but fewer than I expected. Most of what you wished I'd included fell into the category of Honorable Mentions for me so here are ten more of those in no particular order…

In the fifties, CBS acquired the Terrytoons cartoon studio and its entire library. There were some new shows produced for television but mostly they tried repackaging the old ones into shows like this. This is the opening for Farmer Alfalfa and His Terrytoon Pals from 1958 and it's pretty violent as some of those ancient Terrytoons could be…

Kimba the White Lion was a popular Japanese shōnen manga series created by Osamu Tezuka and turned into an animated series over there in 1965. The following year, a dubbed version became very popular here in the U.S. I never cared much for the show but I liked the main title…

A lot of folks thought I'd committed a heinous crime leaving Top Cat (1961) off my Top Ten list. I loved the show but the title and theme song just barely missed the cut. And, hey: See if you can spot Joe Barbera's initials hidden in this opening and also the egregious animation error where someone got the cel levels mixed up near the end. That mistake was on every episode every week and they never fixed it.

Also, the end credits are on here but they aren't real. Hanna-Barbera somehow lost the end titles with the credits but they did have a copy of the end titles without the credits. So they copied the credits off one episode and, imitating the font and the placement, put the same credits on every print of the series, even though the people listed may not have worked on every episode. So every time you see a Top Cat, it says at the end that Kin Platt wrote it but Mr. Platt only wrote a couple…

With the success of the Bugs Bunny cartoons on Saturday morning, Warner Brothers put together another package of their old theatrical cartoons and marketed it in 1964 as The Porky Pig Show. The animation of the new opening title they had made — done, I think by Hal Seeger's studio — was not good but I kinda liked the song…

Before Total Television — a short-lived cartoon studio with distant ties to Jay Ward's — gave us Underdog, they gave us King Leonardo and His Short Subjects (1960) and this was another case where I liked the opening titles more than the show. For some reason, I like that the vocalists sound like they just got everyone in the studio at the moment to gather around a microphone and sing. And there's something nice about a cartoon show main title that ends with some of the characters firing a machine gun at the other characters…

In 1963, veteran animator Joe Oriolo, who had previously done the Felix the Cat cartoons for TV, gave us this series of The Mighty Hercules. I loved the theme song which was composed by Winston Sharples, who did so much of the music for Paramount's cartoons, with lyrics by Mr. Sharples' son and a vocal by Johnny Nash, who later had a couple of hit records like "I Can See Clearly Now"…

This is The Peter Potamus Show, which Hanna-Barbera did in '64 as part of the same deal with Ideal Toys that gave us The Magilla Gorilla Show. As with that series, the sponsor's name was woven into the theme song and there were visual plugs which were awkwardly chopped-out for later syndication.

At the age of twelve when this show went on, I had a great affection for Mr. Potamus, partly because his voice was supplied by Daws Butler. I have affection for any character voiced by Daws Butler and in this case, he was doing a voice not unlike character actor Joe E. Brown. Those who've handled Peter Potamus in more recent times seem to have a desire to disfigure the character and it feels to me like some psycho slashing my old teddy bear. Here he is when he was a pleasant potamus…

This was the opening of the 1964 prime-time series, The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. I assume this came about because of the success of the 1962 Magoo's Christmas Carol special. Loved the special, never quite got into the series but I liked the opening, though not enough for it to make my Top Ten…

Super Chicken was not a show. It was a segment on the Jay Ward series George of the Jungle (1967) but my friend Shelly Goldstein loves this mini-main title. It was, like the main title of the program it appeared on,sung by Stan Worth with the vocal stylings of Bill Scott, who produced the show and voiced its main characters.

Before this, the Ward studios whipped up an unsold pilot for Super Chicken with Don Knotts in the title role and Louis Nye voicing his sidekick, Fred. But these cartoons have Bill Scott as Super Chicken, Paul Frees as Fred and Daws Butler as most of the villains Super Chicken went up against…

Lastly, this was not a cartoon show but it aired among them and that's close enough. Supercar was made for British television beginning in 1960 and airing in this country soon after — the first show I saw featuring "Supermarionation" by Gerry & Sylvia Anderson. I loved the puppetry on the show and I especially liked the part of the main title where the Supercar plunges into someone's goldfish tank.

And though I titled this post "Ten More Openings to Cartoon Shows From When I Was A Kid," I just decided to use some creative accounting and turn it up to eleven. I'm ending with the next "Supermarionation" show I ever saw — Fireball XL5 from 1962. It had a pretty good opening and a great end title. When I was in my teens, I should have tried serenading some girls with that end song. I'll bet one of them would have agreed to go out with me…

Dick Shawn was, of course, one of the major players in my fave film, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. At the time it was made, he had not yet quite attained the stardom of most of the other major players but he was so good in it, that didn't matter. I have talked about this movie with hundreds of people over the year and there seems to be a consensus that the three greatest performances were given by Jonathan Winters, Phil Silvers and Shawn. In a movie packed with professional scene-stealers, that's quite an accomplishment.

Here's Mr. Shawn with Johnny Carson and Burt Reynolds on The Tonight Show for November 11, 1986. That was just a few months before Shawn passed away during the intermission of a one-man show in which he was performing. The video also ends abruptly but what comes before is very funny and very typical of this man's unique, tethered-to-his-own-reality sense of humor. No one else was quite like him and it's unlikely anyone ever will be…

As some of you know, my first few years of writing for television were as part of a team with a clever gent named Dennis Palumbo. After a while, we parted (and have remained) friends and our careers went in very different directions. These days, Dennis is a respected psychotherapist and an author of mystery novels. He recently sat for a two-part interview that's mostly about the psychotherapy end of his world and somewhat about writing. I found it enlightening and perhaps you will too if you read Part One and Part Two.